Justice Sotomayor Becomes Forceful Supreme Court Voice

Feb. 3 (Bloomberg) -- On a U.S. Supreme Court full of
justices with a lot to say, Sonia Sotomayor is beginning to find
her voice.

In her second term since President Barack Obama appointed
her in 2009, Sotomayor is speaking out from the bench for the
rights of prison inmates, banding with her fellow Democratic
appointees on ideologically divisive issues and boring into the
details of federal securities-fraud laws.

And increasingly Sotomayor, 56, is making herself a public
figure. She is using the court’s mid-winter recess to speak with
students around the country, sharing tidbits about her
colleagues and even confessing her insecurities about a job she
says weighs more heavily on her than she had imagined.

“Almost everything I’ve done I’ve been frightened about,
including being a Supreme Court justice,” she said to a packed
auditorium at the University of Chicago Law School this week,
before telling them about reassuring words she received from her
now-retired colleague, John Paul Stevens.

As the court’s first Latina, Sotomayor is perhaps destined
to be in the public eye more than some of her fellow justices. A
poll taken by Findlaw.com in May found that she was better known
than six of her eight colleagues, trailing only Chief Justice
John Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas.

Her visibility among the public is more than matched by her
prominence in the courtroom, where she has established herself
as one of the court’s most active participants during arguments.

“She likes to question advocates early and often,” said
Maureen Mahoney, a Washington appellate lawyer at Latham and
Watkins.

Passion and Legalese

In an Oct. 12 argument about lawsuits against vaccine
makers, she interjected 31 times, according to the court’s
official transcript.

Twenty-six of those were directed at lawyers arguing in
favor of a broad legal shield for drug companies. Sotomayor told
the attorney representing Pfizer Inc.’s Wyeth unit that she was
misconstruing Congress’s intent when it passed a 1986 law
governing claims that vaccines caused injuries.

“You’re making an argument that has a flawed premise,
which is that their only concern was protecting the
manufacturers,” Sotomayor said.

She occasionally injects a note of passion into the
legalese that tends to dominate Supreme Court arguments, as when
she voiced alarm about overcrowded California prisons with
“people sitting in their feces for days in a dazed state.”

“When are you going to get to a point where you’re going
to deliver care that is going to be adequate?” she asked a
lawyer for the state. California is appealing a court order to
reduce its prison population by 46,000.

Microphone Misses

At times, the former trial and appeals court judge suggests
she is still adjusting to her new courtroom. Seated at the far
right-hand side of the bench looking out into the courtroom, she
occasionally neglects to flip on her microphone before speaking,
leaving the audience to wonder what her first few words might
have been.

More than once, she has begun a question even though a
colleague has already started talking, leaving it to Chief
Justice John Roberts to direct traffic.

She drew a rebuke from Justice Antonin Scalia in a consumer
arbitration case in November when she interrupted a lawyer’s
answer to a question, as is common during arguments. “Can you
let him finish?” Scalia snapped, breaching protocol by
addressing another justice directly. Roberts took the younger
justice’s side, telling Sotomayor to go ahead with her question.

Gun Control

Sotomayor has proven to be a reliable member of the court’s
liberal wing on social issues, joining fellow Democratic
appointees Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan.

When the court ruled that the Second Amendment limits gun-control laws by states and cities last year, Sotomayor was one
of four dissenters. She joined an opinion criticizing the
court’s 2008 ruling that interpreted the Second Amendment to
protect individual rights. During Senate testimony that led to
her confirmation in 2009, Sotomayor said she accepted the 2008
ruling as “the law of the land.”

The gun vote “is when I abandoned any hope that she would
be on the moderate side of the liberal bloc,” said Curt Levey,
a critic of Sotomayor’s 2009 nomination and the executive
director of the Committee for Justice in Washington.

She has defied predictions that her experience working in
the Manhattan district attorney’s office might lead her to side
with prosecutors and police more often than some of her
colleagues.

Prisoner Plea

Three times this term, she attached statements to the
court’s refusals to hear appeals from criminal defendants or
inmates. She dissented when the court rebuffed an inmate who
stopped taking his HIV medication to protest a transfer and then
allegedly was punished by being forced to perform hard labor in
100-degree heat.

The allegations, “if true, describe punitive treatment
that amounts to gratuitous infliction of wanton and unnecessary
pain that our precedent clearly prohibits,” Sotomayor wrote in
an opinion no other justice joined. “I cannot comprehend how a
court could deem such allegations ‘frivolous.’”

She has accepted her celebrity status with mixed feelings.
At the Chicago law school event, she lamented no longer being
able to “throw on my sweats” and walk across the street to get
a cup of coffee.

At the same time, she is now embracing her role as a public
figure, whether she be reading to grade school students or
presiding over a law school moot court.

“I think it’s important for the judge to be out in the
world,” she said.